(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a lens and pattern holder for use with a grinding tool to cut a pattern out of a demonstration lens generally provided with any new glasses frame or out of a &lt;&lt;real&gt;&gt; ophtalmic lens.
The invention also relates to a lens and pattern holder for use to cut a lens from a pattern or to duplicate a pattern from another pattern.
(b) Brief Description of the Prior Art
It is of common practice for the manufacturers of glasses frames to give a pattern to the optician with every new frame. This pattern is, in fact, a jig suitable to provide the general parameters necessary to cut a lens so that this lens fits to the frames. Usually, these parameters are the general axes of the lens and its outer contour.
A major problem encountered by the opticians is to keep in store all the patterns necessary to satisfy his consummers' requirement. There is one given pattern for each frame. Since the number of frames that an optician must have or had in store is rather important, the number of patterns to keep in store in order to be able to cut lenses fitting with the existing or old kind of frames is very important too and call for a very well organized classification. Indeed, if a pattern corresponding to a given frame is lost and a customer wants the frame corresponding to this pattern for his new glasses or, alternatively, needs new lenses with his own frame corresponding to this lost pattern, the optician is obliged to contact the frame's manufacturer in order to obtain a new pattern, thereby substantially delaying the delivery of the new glasses to the customer.
In addition, it often happens that patterns supplied to the opticians by some of the frames' manufacturers are of very poor quality, thereby making their use difficult and/or impossible.